I wonder what would happen if the K in knife was said,if part of all the Hs in the book had rubbed away,changing up the shapes of our ancestor's good white bones.

I wonder who's been sleeping in this bale of hay before,how many eyes adore me, how many needles here.I wonder who is bedded, sharp and low, like any twin,kindled by the flickering camp lantern of my name.

It doesn't happen suddenly, but with a rolling hush:some blossom, something citric, and oh so cavalier,moves without me, moves in chorus with the pulse of the night sky.

It's my velvet artwork, making pleasure of a peephole.without me, it can wonder every G-note in the scale,every Aries made of starlight. It's the whirring of my plum.

***

Ann Fisher-Wirth

THE SKELETON LEAVES

I know how to find you.I go where your sleepingis filled with the shadowsof leaves, where the leaves havebled their green,and all that remain aretheir skeletons, nearlytransparent, translucent,and tissue gone blurred asthe moon among clouds, asthe fur on a moth's wing,and tips as if trailingthrough water--

Such leaves are not common.In this snowy countrythey cherish them, save them,the white skelettbladen--like us, they have died, tobecome more enduring.

***

Ben Mazer

A STAR IS BORN

Her feigned indifference stung his vanity;a small town girl with sawdust in her veins;a modern pilgrim, who had changed her name;a girl with glasses, thrumming in his brain;

the brazen hypocrite, she knew his name;subscribed to Star and Screen, jumped out of cakes;yet she had got his goat; he hit the brakes,but felt his life was founded on a lie.

Big parties were his own familiar waters;life took his coat; his name was on its lips;he spent the evening in the servants' quarters,trying to get a date, and washing cups.

He told the boss he wanted a screen test;the studio would write him a blank check;he told her that she never would be his,that now she never could be like the rest.

His will was done; the out of town reviewskilled the first rushes, but the biggest newswas that her presence had eclipsed his fame;each questionaire was filled out with her name.

Now in the afternoons when she came backhe had prepared a cozy little snack,and they let down their hair; he didn't daretell her his fears, but she knew what they were.

He slapped a reporter, not the thing to dowhen he had credit nowhere in the town,except among the elder set who knewjust what it was the younger man had done.

Then finally left on his own holiday.Prepared the picnic, but forgot the brunch.He dropped his robe and swam out to the stars;now you can see which one of them is hers.

***

Rodney Koeneke

FRANKENSTEIN'S PURSUIT

For weeks we yo-yo'd up and down the Five.Stopping for gas, I’d find the bill was paid.He'd wait for me when I fell behind.Elizabeth, my perfect family, dead . . .

Near the interchange I caught his plates.He slowed down, leering as I roared past.His yolky eye, the tell-tale brainpan stitch--Is it these imperfections that I hate?

I see in you a part of what I am.You see in me the thing you cannot be.Some incompletion drove me to persist;

Of all my rotting parts you are the sum. Needing a god to blame, how could you seeIt's in those borrowed eyes that I exist?

***

C.J. Sage

PRAYER FOR MANY EYES

Let the thousand visions fall away.Let the sleep of reason grace our eyeskindly with its many veils, to staythe knowledge of the hurtful world. --Deny!Men I know have fallen (many men)prey to the temptations of sight and sense.Women kept to their convictions, thengave them all up, just to walk the fence:pain on one side, more pain on the other.Now let the lids of knowing take their rest;let me close my own to the faults of brothersand sisters in this life, difficult at best.Let us be grateful for the wealths of boredom.Let us, heirs of Argus, be more dumb.

Blessing flows via tubes transfusing plasmaTunnel high as you will, but take a flashlight-- Acid batteries stencil wings on darknessHeaven stages desire and speaks in echoClouds like papery hymnals shuffle praise-songs

A blink rinses the eye of sorrow's visionsWindblown cirrus revolves in blades of jet smoke

DECEMBER PARADELLE

Days resemble each other like sheaves of wheatDays resemble each other like sheaves of wheat Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.I like your hurt. Feelings resemble other days gathering sheaves of wheat after each blade trail.

Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall.I smoke to recall words in a voice like the room Your dream surrounds, blurs all want of me.

Answer the telephone although it never rings.Answer the telephone although it never rings.Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.It comes to this: the postman rings: letters sleepin telephone box. Never answer no.

No smoke blurs the hurt to me of your answer.Sheaves of dream letters trail the postman. Days sleep in this room like a telephone box. It rings. All words come to resemble each other. I never voice feelings--although recall surrounds like wheat after blade. I want your gathering in.

***

Anand Thakore

Two poems

DEAD, AT YOUR MOTHER'S FUNERAL

As if to quench the first little wisp of flame,Rain fell in torrents when I reached the grounds,Beating wildly upon the low tin roof,Like a great hurt beast no will could tame.

Sweat covered your forehead, your blue sleeves wet,As you took the hot brand into your palms,Turning towards me before you lit the sticks,Your brown hair drenched as when we first met.

Can I say I still loved the man I saw,Whose loss I turned so quickly away from?I saw you through tongues of leaping flame,And cold eyes of ice no flame could thaw,

Your mother burning as I thought of my own,Seeking no way into the cell of your grief;No way out of mine as I heaped her with twigs,Poured oil on damp wood and watched you like a stone.

FOG AT PANCHGANI

I have waited all morning for this fog to clear,Looking through its folds for stray signs of green;Yet now that the terraced slopes and paddy-fieldsAnd the woods that it hid draw steadily near--

The thick moss on a branch, the full heightOf a hill, and the lily-spotted weirShimmering insistently in late noon heat,The eye retreats in fear from approaching light;

And I long more strongly for the fog to come down,Covering in a single length of shroudThe bright greens it wrapped in torn scraps of grey;And the watcher outside whom it would not drown.

Great Maker of Fog, release my eyes.Cast them into this swirl of grey and green,Till they come to feel at home in change.Grant them the craft of swift goodbyes.

("Taylor's men roam and kill at will. They aredressed in shower hats and wedding dresses The shower hats are for the rain. No one knows what the wedding-dressesare for" --Denis Johnson, war correspondent. )

Mind your step because of the piled up corpses.This night's haul is over two hundred dead andkillers roaming streets in their white lace dresses.make people fearful.

Off the sidewalk, people in lanes and alleys,retching, think of cannibal voodoo rumourhope that what they've eaten was not cadaver--that's what the dogs eat.

Sharks this year are circling in shallows waiting.Wedding dresses add to the terror, killersdrag the corpses down to the blood-frilled surf forthat's what the sharks eat.

***

Jerry Harp

THE CREATURE FINDS HIS MARK

My man showed up again, the oneWhose skin I breathed for days--appearedAmong a sidewalk's tables and chairs.He looked my way, his perfect waveOf hair accosting the breeze.Savvy monks crept from his eyes.The sidewalk voices knocked and rangLike iron balls beaten against brick walls.He looked my way again, and in a single sweepTook in a crow, a cloud, his table companion,Some handsome guy in a vanilla suit.His half smile told a tale.My Creature wrath and desire were razedTo the street. Where else were they to go?The flickering streetlight cast an aureole.

***

Eve Adamson

Two poems

THE AFTERNOON I WAS BORN OUT OF MY OWN HEAD

1.

Remember the serpent from the other story?We'd met him before, read his CV

(Part myth, part bald-faced lie), found his cream-and-coralComplexion something admirable.

Remember how we let him crawl all over us?That was before you had a face,

Before you taught me what I didn't know I knewThat day we crumpled into two.

The loveless and unlovely skin&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Reclined around about her,The Nuzzled One, the Not-at-Home,&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp The nuzzled and the sated,&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Her watchings-close have turned her eye,She kicks against the weak and pale&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp The careless and the fated&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp With tongue and arch and nail.

***

Landis Everson

Three poems

Note: Landis Everson was part of the original "Berkeley Renaissance" in the late '40s, an intimate of the Duncan-Spicer-Blaser circle (Spicer was in love with him, and to Duncan he was the "Poet-King"), and later (circa 1960) a member of the Spicer-Blaser-Jim Herndon-Landis Everson Sunday reading group in San Francisco. Ashbery printed some of his things in Locus Solus in 1962, but Landis did not appear in print until two sequences (Postcard from Eden and "The Little Ghosts I Played With") were printed in their entirety last year in Ben Mazer's anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance in Fulcrum 3 (2004), Everson's first appearance in print in more than 40 years. He is now in his mid-70s, alive and well in San Luis Obispo, and has started writing poetry again. This spring, A volume of new and collected poems, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, is forthcoming.

BALANCE

The morning snapped up like a window shadeWhen dogs came barking down the hillFilling memories and the sleeping roomsWith savagery. Not hard to tellWhat puny prize they chased or why a dayThat warmed its fingers on my chestWas busy elsewhere cheering life and death.

An egg and bacon regularityThe minutes calm as coffee passedAnd stuck. I waited for the cry of fateOutside the house and thought, this worldOf love pretends no modesty--hopeAnd fear like rancid habits boundAcross the apple seeds and dust of danger.

MEMORY CHEST

Things he had discovered,A watch, a gold tooth, a diary,Lay before him in the boxAfter sixty years of death.

The elephant was also thereSomething like a rose leafJammed in, pressed and fadedAfter sixty years of death.

Things he had discoveredJammed in pressed and fadedSomething like a rose leaf--What else had he expected?

The elephant was also thereLay before him in the box.A watch, a gold tooth, a diary--What else had he expected?

After sixty years of deathWhat else had he expected?He jammed himself within the boxAnd hugged the dead-set elephant.

PANTOUM

Hunger led him to discover(That ancient enemy of the belly)Starving on a mountain topThe form that trembled in the thickets.

That ancient enemy of the bellyTold its knowledge to the heart.The form that trembled in the thickets,Something love and hate could eat,

Told its knowledge to the heart--All is prey that can be swallowed.Something love and hate could eatThe eye was well trained to remember.

All is prey that can be swallowedThe earth exceeds itself in offeringThe eye was well trained to rememberBeauty has a double shape.

The earth exceeds itself in offeringBoth the beauty and the flesh.Beauty has a double shape--One the bow kills one the heart.

Both the beauty and the flesh(One the bow kills one the heart)Leapt up stricken from his fancy--He ate the world up with his eyes.

One the bow kills one the heartHunger led him to discover--He ate the world up with his eyesStarving on the mountain top.

***

Michael Ladd

MID LIFE

You notice which lights have gone out in which signs,and Time, Time, how you paw over Time.The sound, in your mind, of closing doorsis a distant, ominous roarlike the sea heard in a rented shack, late at night.You pace, you fret on what mightor might not have been.The thousand life possibilities that you sawhave come down now to three or four.You follow the streets of this moonless town,feeling youth come back like heat storedin the day, released now from the night's brick walls.In a shop window--an LP sleeve, a mirror ball,tawdry things invested with such sweet aching;a life once yours.The past: chew on it, gnawthe rancid bone, that's what it's for.

***

Regina Derieva

Two poems

Translated from the Russian by Alan Shaw

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,of lands I've never seen, of underpinnings,of air and salt, of elemental thingsunmeddled with by endings or beginnings,

of clay and iron, and of ocean waveand shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to bravethe rifles, turning into heavenly stone,

of quiet and simplicity, bestowedupon us by a woman among women,of emptiness that stretches like a roadinto a vastness where things lose their meaning,

of whisperings, of looking long at thatwhich goes among us by the name of God,at death, which never was, and now is not,at life, of which so little can be had.

THE AGE WAS IRON: IT'S GONE TO RUST

The age was iron: it's gone to rust,corroded over like a knife,the edge of naked power lostthat had worlds trembling for their life.A shard of dingy steel remains.they carefully polish it with sand,and the awful muscle strains,with primal impulse, at the hand.

Pink--the very sound is odd.Why "p" and "k" together?The gentle and the harsh,the melodious and the rugged?Nothing is, after all,that cannot be together,and yet, and yet,the marriage of the gentle and the harshis a combination questionable though realLet the word resound anyway.Let the child laugh at the pink hair on her doll,and the servant in the kitchenrecall the pink undies of her fallen mistress.

***

Henry Gould

RIDDLE OF THE KINGDOM

A man becomes the song he sings. --Irish proverb

You won't find it in the newspaper; nor in some Caribbean hideaway. Not in the careful phrases of professors, nor the alcoholic dénouement of a working day.

Deep in the framed confusion of a window, a bird's rehearsing (hidden in a tree). Warbling the only song he knows, with aching slowness, tenderly.

And halter burning. His death is comedy,One side effect of zero gravity.

***

Lyn McCredden

Two poems

IN THE SUNNY AIR

Years from now, standing in the sunny air,you're holding something precious in your hands.Leaning, contented, by your side there,someone's smiling; around you light expands.The camera's keen, but it's unpropheticand cannot tell me what it is you holdso tenderly. It's your fragile secretfurled in the future. But it makes you bold:those bright blue eyes look back, direct, assured,reflecting open skies, a blessednessyou share with all you touch, unconfusedby tawdry prizes, this world's injustice.The treasure you hold in the sunny airis what I will never see, with you, there.

OLD FRIEND

I choose to live in a mongrel suburb,my scruffy street a united nations.You live on the leafy side, unperturbedby sameness, your own face, your relations.You tell me, over coffee and éclair,that on a rare train trip last week you'd seena boy from Footscray, or somewhere out there,you know, tats, moccasins and stove pipe jeans.He'd vomited in the carriage, right therein front of everyone. Didn't clean up,just stared round with a stupid grin. Who cares?The look on your face was not quite disgust,telling your little Western suburb story,but unamused, self-congratulatory.

***

Charles O. Hartman

FLAMENCO SKETCHES

I. Miles

Still fall Another drift of sunshine A day, and then some No need for snow

Strange creatures scaled down We tune a canny ear to the unmoved hour

Strung high, the icy cloud sings of a blue trappedin a blue And so: too

Off on one hand the rind of an undiscarded moon Off-season fields lie paralyzed for some Persephone Her place held firm by a zero Between's return

Then again, the spring's wound one way

Ideally, the poem's rhythmic regime should need no explanation at all, because it means to be compulsory: granting only the need to speak slowly, a reader speaking these lines aloud should reproduce the exact rhythm of Miles's solo on the last track from Kind of Blue. [Note: the originally released cut, not the alternate take also available on current CDs.]

The principles are simple in the abstract: one syllable per note of course (though here and there identifying either one can be tricky), composed into lexical and syntactical strings that, aside from making sense locally and globally, enlist the intonation and rhythmic patterns of English to approximate the musical rhythms of the solo. Because syllable-length is audible in English (though not semantic as in Classical languages), it's possible to mimic musical notes' combination of duration and distribution within the bar. Consonant clusters can be used to slow down the speech, clitics to speed it up, assonance to foreground it. Line-breaks can enforce the boundaries of musical phrases and not merely indicate them. Denser and looser syntax, more and less figurative language, modulate the rhythm as much as word- and phrase-stress do. Rhythm concerns emphasis as well as speed.

In practice the application is difficult because features on all levels of the linguistic hierarchy from phoneme to clause are in play jointly and continuously--drawing to a four-dimensional inside straight.

This explains why section I is not yet accompanied by section II, "Coltrane" or section III "Cannonball." Miles, for instance, distributes just 97 notes over the 95 seconds of his solo; the densest of Coltrane's 25 measures contains 24 notes.

In this passage, italics are used to indicate the point in his solo where Miles moves closer to the microphone.

Snowfall after a softening week of rain.We say the season's going, then it‚s gone.Waking in the night, I feel the after-painof something broken, nothing to be done.

Something broken or something torn. Outside,I hear the grate of a paw on muffled groundand think, Pointless to resist the dark's sure slide;binders of the dark, we are by darkness bound.

Then I think how often and against what oddsthe poem gets written. Common as breath,or the breath's slow ceasing. (The great head nodstoward the sudden figure at the door.) One wish:

To wake in the night and find the night has passed,the world around us itching like a cast.

2.

One stopped his walk to watch the headlights grow.One left the engine running in a grove.One, by thirty, knew all there was to knowthen happened on her lover with his love.One learned to find her name carved in the sky.One died to reach the wisdom of the bone.One lived to get his own back in the eye.One to this very day remains unknown--

Not pain, but after-pain, pain's reprobate.(For they say it‚s winter and we‚ve come too late.)Yet who among us, taking the moment‚s measure,wouldn't mortgage fully the unglittering end?Who among us could resist the ancient wager, waking from its lair the hibernating fiend?

***

Amy King

RECORD KEEPING

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. --Wittgenstein

These are the things you think you said.It's just that I have no way of knowingwhat to tell you. I fill you fullof roots and prefixes, signifiers andthe dialectic, and still my company mixeswith the party. I won't tow the linethough. Better the diagnoses thanprescriptions. Herein, my drink remainsdisplaced. She ambles along inher careful constructions. Againstthe wall, she overlaps her shadow upright.The table over there offers refreshments.When I say I am of does that followwith good riddance? The end of manoften lies at hand, but whereof can onenot speak? It is on the table; it is in my grasp;it has soaked into the carpet. As a woman,my permission opens me aimlessly:I move my mouth and walk therein.

***

Mimi Khalvati

GHAZAL

When you wake to jitters every day, it's heartache.Ignore it, explore it, either way, it's heartache.

Youth's a map you can never refold,from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it's heartache.

The moon in a swoon, you're in his arms,the fandango starts, the palm trees sway, it's heartache.

Oh love, love, who are centuries old.It's not time or absence I can't weigh, it's heartache.

Why do nightingales sing in the dark?What the eye can't see, the soul will say, it's heartache.

Who would dare to call their pain despair?As long as faith holds true, men can pray, it's heartache.

Let the Sufi meaning of my name,'a quiet retreat', heal as it may its heartache.

***

Michael Helsem

FEGEFEUER

Distances I never choseand those to comeconverse together where I standabandoned and dumb.The birds sing shrill and very loudin a crowded tree;I wonder what it takes to curefuturitythat sings within my bloodstream likea psychic gale,and yet allows no single bareairt to prevail . . .So I remain, and cobble whimsof crimson fromdistances I never chose,and those to come.

***

Nikia Billingslea

Two poems

I. AFRO SAPPHO

Nappy heads make for strong minds against bullshit.Dreadlocks are not so dreadful when they conductRa energy, divine, on naked gray streetsstrewn with blood money.

II. COFFEEHOUSE PROPHET

With long bony fingers tugging reddish browngoatee, he sits at the bar‚s end watchingcaffeine-stimulated drama; his onyxeyes look straight through me.

III. S.I.N. ON STAGE

Caramel and Chocolate, Sappho‚s daughters.When they speak, echoes of African drums beattrance-inducing rhythm while they extol thevirtues of the P.